Article published In: Lingvisticæ Investigationes
Vol. 38:1 (2015) ► pp.133–182
Sémantique des énoncés itératifs
Une approche formelle
Article language: French
Published online: 18 September 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.38.1.05enj
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.38.1.05enj
This article is about the semantics of iterative statements, expressing repetition in time of a type-eventuality. With these statements are associated frequency properties, quantified by iterative adverbs (often, sometimes, sporadically, n times out of p…). Our purpose is to design a formal representation, with a method allowing to compute it from the text. The interpretation of an iterative statement closely relies on its information structure so that we first study precisely the topic-focus partition for a significant range of configurations. In the formal model, the occurrences of iterative eventualities or circumstants are represented by sequences of intervals. The temporal semantic of a sentence is then formalised as an instanciation of generic formulas using two types of generalised quantifiers.
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